Blog

Kanban for new agile teams? I think it is a good idea

Last year, I was hired by Seedbox Technologies to be the Scrum Master of a new agile-scrum team. This team was starting working in the agile world just when I started working with them. Here is a very brief summary of the context that I found at that time:

1.The team had been working together for a long period of time.

2.Agile + scrum trainning had given to the team from an external consultant.

3.The team was doing their second sprint ever.

4.Product Backlog priorities were blur

5. Product Owner was driving the team in a command & control way. (Self-organization, what’s that?

6. People on the team was frustated, not a lot of collaboration in place and poor interactions were dictating our days.

7. Continuous improvement? what are you talking about?

Here is what I would say one year and a six month after of several experiences with this team:

1. Kanban is less constrained than scrum, it helped the team understand and build on the top of their own product development process.

2. Having a visual of the value stream and the process itself, was really helpfull to guide the team to see and catch places to improve.

3. Implementing the Kanban system gradually was the way to successfully create the constinuous improvement mindset within the team.

4. Establishing Work in Progress limits by status within the process, encourage them to relate, have better interactions and collaboration to unblock the pull system, when something was not progressing within the workflow.

5. The team started asking for priorities to the Product Owner sooner, and that helped a lot to get into the real and required conflicts.

6. Having them decide what rules were explicitly required to move foward from a status to the other, helped them to start taking care of the quality of the product and to have comun agreements to get work done.

From the predictability point of view and having a pace to relate to, well I would say that the Kanban system was not helping a lot but I would definetly use it to train a new agile team to make them an incredible, high performance Scrum team then.

By the way, today’s team history is that we have a great Scrum team, working in two weeks long sprints, relating to each other, having great conversations, highly responsible, on their way to reduce waste and increasing their productivity.

So do yourself a favor: Instead of forcing whatever framework or process you have been told to make to work, ask the team first and help them find what fits better to they own needs.

Thank you for sharing your own experiences, I would love to hear what you have to say.